Planning Heuristics for Integrated Train Shunting and Service Scheduling

Trains have to be maintained and cleaned regularly to ensure passenger safety and satisfaction. These service tasks must be performed outside the rush hours, when the trains are parked off the main railway network on shunting yards. At these shunting yards, planners have to match incoming and outgoing trains, schedule the service tasks, assign trains to parking tracks and route the trains over the location. The corresponding planning problem combines the Train Unit Shunting Problem (TUSP) with features of classical RCPSPs. To find feasible plans, we propose a local search approach that integrates the four planning aspects. The performance of this heuristic is investigated in a case study for the Dutch Railways (NS).

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